


Silver Screen

by gwendee



Category: Assassination Classroom
Genre: Abandonment, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dysfunctional Family, Established Relationship, First Meetings, Fluff, Ice Skating, M/M, Mild Angst, Post-Canon, Winter, the usual, you know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-27
Updated: 2021-01-27
Packaged: 2021-03-13 04:29:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29022741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gwendee/pseuds/gwendee
Summary: Gakushuu spins circles around him, almost knocking him off his feet."You're just showing off," Karma says.Gakushuu raises an eyebrow."You're always showing off," Karma corrects.Contrary to popular belief, Gakushuu Asano has a hobby.Written for Karushuu Week 2021 on tumblr!
Relationships: Akabane Karma/Asano Gakushuu
Comments: 22
Kudos: 124





	Silver Screen

**Author's Note:**

> (Chanting) [KARUSHUU WEEK KARUSHUU WEEK KARUSHUU WEEK 2021](https://karushuu--week.tumblr.com/post/639125461973254144/2021-prompts)
> 
> This fic, along with my entry for the prompt Cat (which is either day 5 or 6 I think) are the first ones I wrote when I saw the prompts! I don't have anything written for tomorrow's prompt (Fake Dating) and the last one (Assassin) yet, oops! Hopefully something short comes to mind.

**Good night, sleep tight**

_ Contrary to popular belief, Gakushuu Asano does have a hobby.  _

“Looks like Kunugigaoka’s Ice Prince knows how to dance after all.”

Gakushuu looks over his shoulder. He sees a flash of red as he glides past the bank of the frozen lake. He lets momentum pull him forward, going along with the grooves he’s already made in the ice as he traces another round around the circumference of the lake. 

He slows to a stop next to his single audience member, cutting a line perpendicular to the track to brake. 

“How long did it take for you to come up with that quip?”

“Longer than I should have needed,” Karma admits. 

“You’re getting sloppy,” Gakushuu teases.

Karma smiles at him, eyes crinkling at the corners. 

Gakushuu watches Karma walk over to where Gakushuu’s placed his bag by the tree, and he sits down and starts lacing up his own skates. Gakushuu kicks forward again, and glides another lap around the lake.

The first snowfall of the season comes with an even colder house, although, the house has been cold for a long time. Winter settles in like a heavy blanket across sleeping Japan, and the chill that blows through the hallways of the grand Asano estate meets a locked door.

His father’s office is chilly in the summer months and uncomfortably warm in the winter, and through the windows Gakushuu can see his father meander lethargically from his desk, to the wall of nostalgic trinkets he’s locked in glass cases. 

It’s during winter the man gets particularly soft, rounded in the ways a stone would after years in the river. He looks outside his window (where Gakushuu is in the yard, looking back at him) like he doesn’t expect snow; like he doesn’t expect something so cold to be so white and bright. 

Every academic year during winter break the Asano boys find themselves in a lull of their duties, and more often than not they find something to occupy their time with, so they’re not alone with their thoughts or each other.

This year his father seems more melancholy than usual, Gakushuu thinks, as he watches his silhouette unlock the glass case to pick things up and put things down. 

Gakushuu is turning eighteen this year.

Three streets down, the house Karma lives in is no smaller and no warmer, but Karma has most of the doors locked and the keys shut in the corner of the sitting room cabinet where he keeps out of sight, out of mind. 

There are only so many affluent neighborhoods in the city, so how far could they be from each other, really? And most of the rich children from rich parents in Kunugigaoka that lie in the same tax bracket buy large empty houses such as these; such so that you could be living next to your classmate and have no idea. 

No idea who your neighbors are, because people keep to each other.

Large empty yards as some arbitrary marker of affluence now covered in large thick yards of snow, with cleared driveways and no footsteps from the gates to the front doors.

In Karma’s house there is no fireplace, or rather there had been a fireplace, but his parents had bricked it up before deciding to leave their young ward home alone for the better part of a decade. He’ll do something silly with it, they say, like set the house on fire, 

But which child would set the house on fire, to feel what warmth?-

-ah, perhaps, a legitimate concern. 

So Karma buys an oven, one of those large ones that you could probably stuff twenty whole roasts in, and with that oven he starts his foray into baking. When the weather gets colder he whips up more batches of batter, and then settles next to the oven as it warms up the whole room. 

The kitchen island becomes where he spends most of his days, a blanket draped over his chair and tea happily boiling in the kettle. When the nights get shorter and the days get warmer he switches out the hot drinks for cold ones in the fridge and opens the window to let the oven heat out. Some might say he has a candy addiction, but his sweet tooth is what keeps him company during freezing nights, so Karma finds it hard to give up on sugary bakes. 

Until he turns sixteen and a half and his tongue finds something else sweet and his arms find something else warm, curled up on the bench by the kitchen island with homework and highlighters and the faint smell of lavender fabric softener. 

His boyfriend doesn’t like his sweets too sweet (ironic) so Karma cuts down on the sugar he puts in his sugar cookies.

Gakushuu has spun two laps when Karma joins him, steadily weaving through the lines Gakushuu has drawn until they’re hand in hand. Gakushuu, slightly more adept of the two, spins around and skates backwards, first holding Karma’s hands and then a little bit faster and finally faster still, until they’re chasing each other’s laughter through rounds and rounds around the frozen lake. 

Gakushuu’s father is the most overbearing sort of overprotective and overachieving. He wanted his son to learn everything in the world and he didn’t have time to teach him anything, but anybody else would do it wrong. 

It’s a little unfair for the ice prince of Kunugigaoka (as Kunugigaoka so lovingly dubs him) to know so much, but Gakushuu knows so much because his father knows so much, and Gakuhou had tried to carve out with immaculate detail a miniature version of himself.

So his father taught him everything he knows and stubbornly refused to let anyone else do it because “they would filter dumb inefficient little ideas into Gakushuu’s little head”. And Gakushuu agreed, because the elementary school teachers he did have at the time talked to him like he was a little child even though he was no longer a little child (he was), and Gakushuu was sick of it.

And then when he was older and his father got busier, his father spent less time teaching him more things and wanted him to learn even more things with even less help. Gakushuu learns to do calculus and play the guitar and dissect a mouse and play the piano and map out astronomical charts and recalculate relativity and play the violin in his study room, books stacked so high it might as well have been an accent wall. 

But the fun tidbit here is: his father never taught Gakushuu how to ice skate.

With so many activities he does because his father wanted him to do, Gakushuu wanted something to do that he could call his own, so he makes a list and wracks his brain and comes up with ice-skating.

His father doesn’t teach him ice-skating, even though he knew how to ice-skate (Gakushuu assumes he does, because his father knows everything.) Instead Gakushuu chalks his father’s aversion up to simply not wanting to spend time above a body of water - a frozen thin sheet above body of water, specifically, where the water below is so still and dark and murky and you can see your reflection if the ice is clear enough when you look down at your feet. 

And his father probably does have many ghosts waiting for him underneath a still and clear body. Of water. 

So Gakuhou ranted and raved and told Gakushuu off for wanting to waste his time in frivolous activities, then told Gakushuu that the only way he was getting lessons were if those fees came out of pocket (Gakushuu was seven, but his father had decided that a seven year old needed financial savvy, which made Gakushuu suffer through many more lectures on monetary management because he just spent his entire savings then on a pair of skates and a membership to the ice rink.)

(He hadn’t needed to pay for lessons after all, because as it turns out most people were very readily willing to guide a small child around their way, asking questions like “where are your parents”, “did you come here alone”, “want me to hold your hand” and “you want me to show you how I just did that trick?”)

Kunugigaoka calls their ice prince academically inclined, that his transcript of know-hows seem more like a resume than for any sort of leisure. But contrary to popular belief, Gakushuu Asano does have a hobby.

The Ice Prince melts in Karma’s hands one day in late summer, when the heat turns the leaves crisp dry and the wind blows like they’ll soon fall off the branches. The breeze of early autumn creeps in with a draft through the open window of the student council room, and deep in his work Gakushuu doesn’t notice until he’s sneezing in the line at the cafeteria. 

The lunch lady heats up his drink a few extra seconds before handing it off and he’s back in his work again, window shut this time, but the door opens.

“Did someone catch a cold?” Karma says, fingers dancing over the doorway.

“I’m not cold,” Gakushuu says unconvincingly, and he sneezes again. 

“The weather forecast this morning said the temperature would drop more today,” Karma says, a little chiding. “Everyone comes in wearing something slightly warmer and you don’t think anything of it?”

“It’s not like I could go home to get a coat,” Gakushuu protests. 

He sneezes again, twice. 

Karma walks over until he’s eye to eye with Gakushuu, and from his bag he pulls out the scarf he’s brought from home that he had originally planned to wear on the chilly walk back and then snuggle in with on his kitchen comfy chair, but the sight of the student council then vice-president letting out kitten sneezes in the middle of the hallway was too adorable to resist. 

Karma unfurls the scarf and then loops it around Gakushuu’s neck and shoulders, and that motion means he draws Gakushuu just a little bit closer to his chest, and so Karma gets a closer look at the tips of his eyelashes and the planes of his face. The gradual reddening of Gakushuu’s cheeks draws Karma’s gaze lower, where- 

“-You have freckles!” Karma says, unfairly delighted. 

Gakushuu makes a strangled noise halfway between a shriek and a squeak (a squriek, if you will) and he would probably have made to bury his face in his hands if not for the inconvenient obstruction that is Karma Akabane and the scarf that smells like his soap. 

Karma, struck suddenly by their proximity and Gakushuu’s bashfulness and the fact that he’s tying a bright red string around a boy’s neck, finds himself stammering through attempts of an excuse to remain as close to Gakushuu as possible.

In the corner of the small student council room where the windows are closed and the air is cold enough to make for a reason for people to huddle together, the boys stay standing close together long after Karma’s hands leave the scarf he’s spent way too long tying and re-tying around Gakushuu’s collar, and the sweetness that Karma is tasting might be from the strawberry milk he’s just had or the sugary cinnamon of Gakushuu’s shampoo. 

The door opens. They spring apart, except - trapped between the small space of the table and the wall and a chair - there is not much way to spring apart from.

The then student council president in their year above them raises an eyebrow. “I was going to tell you to take a break, Asano, when I heard you were headed straight here instead of having a lunch,” she pauses, “but I see you’re not overworking yourself. Good.”

Gakushuu makes a squriek. President giggles, and she shuts the door.

Gakushuu spins, and again, and again, and again.

“Now you’re just showing off,” Karma says, his fingers grazing Gakushuu’s shoulder as Gakushuu twirls past him onto the expanse of ice. 

The first time Karma ice-skated was when his parents still loved him, in some foreign city that Karma only hardly remembers the sound of. Unsteady feet and even unsteadier grip on the handrails and he's shooting past their feet, and his mother laughs and picks him up and his father pats his head and says he's a good skater-

One particular day has him chasing that feeling, eight years old and he hasn't seen head or tail of either parent for the past birthday, so he heads to the ice rink all alone, and it's that day that he sees another kid his age. Karma would go up and talk to him except that the other kid is popular and loud and everyone older than them is already going up and talking to him, and when he skates he does large sweeping circles and cool spins. Karma is shy, and he stays in his little corner, skating in tiny circles by himself.

The kid must see him because he skates past Karma several times, and each time Karma wonders/hopes that the kid would say hi. He never does, dancing past Karma on the ice like he never even notices Karma is there.

Gakushuu looks at him like he's the only thing here, now, with the forest around them silent and still, ambient sounds of the world asleep punctuated by the slicing of ice. 

"Remember when we first met?" Karma says, and this time he's the one skating backwards - slower, less steady. Gakushuu holds his hands. 

Gakushuu tilts his head. "In school, or…"

"The ice rink," Karma says. 

“Ah,” Gakushuu says, his eyes twinkling with a fair memory, and his fingers brush Karma’s cheeks. “How can I forget?”

They hardly speak about it, because it’s from a time they both hardly remember, seven years old and searching for a feeling they can’t ever catch. Karma looks for his parents’ voice in the ice and Gakushuu skates over the frozen ghosts of his father’s past. 

Not that Gakushuu didn’t notice Karma back then, but he just didn’t have an incentive to go speak to him, not when there were already tons of people by him. And Gakushuu didn’t do anything for fun then, not that he considered ice-skating an academic pursuit, but prioritizing showing his father up at the one sport the man didn’t do took precedence over making friends, so the only people Gakushuu talked to were people who could teach him something. 

But it wasn’t that Gakushuu wouldn’t have spoken to Karma if Karma came to him first, because friendliness took diplomatic interest. So maybe they would have become friends as early as seven, or maybe they would have one cordial conversation and never again. Who knows, really?

On their first date Karma takes him to a museum, and on their second date Gakushuu takes them to a movie, and on their third date Karma takes them to an ice-skating rink.

It's the first time Karma sees Gakushuu so excited. And Karma doesn't go back to the rink after the first time he meets Gakushuu so he doesn't see Gakushuu go back day and day again and practice until he has sprained ankles and bruises on his knees, and chattering teeth. 

So when Gakushuu pulls him onto the ice, Karma doesn't expect him to start spinning circles around him. Fast, fast, faster-

"Woah," Karma says, as Gakushuu almost knocks him off his feet. 

"You're just showing off," Karma says.

Gakushuu raises an eyebrow. 

"You're always showing off," Karma corrects.

Gakushuu smiles at him, a little amused and a little sharp, and he glides backwards with two long sweeping strokes to make space for Karma to move forward.

They move the first lap slowly, and Karma staggers a little unsteadily because it's been a while since he's skated. Gakushuu doesn't tease the way he would at any other competition, maybe he's feeling generous today. ("I'm happy you're willing to embarrass yourself to do something I like," Gakushuu tells him, when he kisses Karma on the cheek, after helping Karma up from falling on his ass. It just makes Karma fall down again.)

It’s a cold day on Karma’s eighteen birthday, so he heads down to the kitchen and turns on his oven. His middle school friends come, Nagisa and Kayano and Nakamura and all the others from 3-E, and during the day they stay in the sitting room warmed up by the laughter of everyone there and the oven happily bakes tray after tray after tray, 

Then one by one they leave as the sun dips lower, and Karma leans in more and more as the hugs grow longer and longer. Then he’s standing alone in the kitchen, hand hovering over the oven’s start button, lingering heat gently emanating from the last batch of cookies. Should he bake one last one?

Knock, knock. 

It’s 11.58 and Gakushuu throws his arms around Karma. “Happy birthday,” he whispers, drawing Karma closer.

It’s new year’s eve and Gakushuu and Karma skate round and round and round the ice rink. The sun sets, the little bit left of the moon rises, and they’re far enough away from the city that they don’t hear the pops of the fireworks, but they watch the sky wash in color. 

They stand there for a moment, holding hands, watching reds and yellows and whites and blues; the ice below their skates glow brilliantly with the reflection.

Then Gakushuu tugs Karma’s hand and pulls him along, drawing new lines in the ice.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic looks like it just became a headcanon dump.  
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
